your body speaks | Holistic Healing, Listening to Your Body, Women’s Health Over 40, Christian Health Podcast, Faith-Based Wellness

Ep22: Rebuilding Body Trust After Years of Restriction ft. Brittany Braswell, RD

• Dr. Brook Sheehan • Season 2 • Episode 9

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Is it safe to listen to your body after years of ignoring its signals?

In this powerful episode of your body speaks, I’m joined by faith-filled dietitian and podcast host Brittany Braswell, RD, for a deep conversation about what it really means to trust your body again—especially after a long season of restriction, binge cycles, or disordered eating patterns.

We go beyond the food and dive into the four pillars of health—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual—to explore how they influence hunger cues, metabolic signals, and our ability to rebuild trust from the inside out.

You'll learn:

  • What happens physiologically when we ignore hunger cues
  • Why you can’t always trust your hunger early in recovery—and what to do instead
  • The real difference between “body wisdom” and “interoceptive awareness”
  • Brittany’s 4-step nutrition ladder: adequacy, balance, variety, specificity
  • Her 3 non-negotiables for building body trust (this part is 🔥)
  • How faith, submission, and logic work together when decoding body signals

If you’ve ever said, “I don’t know what my body wants anymore,” this episode is your permission slip to slow down, reset, and begin again—with support and grace.

🎧 Listen in and be sure to check out Brittany’s free Body Trust Framework Workbook:
 👉 https://www.brittanybraswellrd.com/btf

Connect with Brittany on Social Media: 

INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/brittanybraswellrd/

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/groups/christianwomeninrecovery

✨ Ready to shift from fear to faith in your body? Discover the Talk to Me, Body affirmation card deck—your daily reminder that God designed your body with wisdom and resilience.
Get yours here → drbrooksheehan.com/talk-to-me-body

🎧 Stay Connected + Explore More Support:

If today’s episode spoke to something deeper in you, there’s so much more waiting for you inside my world.

💬 Start meaningful conversations with your body using the Talk to Me, Body affirmation card deck. Each card is written from your body’s perspective to help you shift from fear to faith in your healing.

📔 Track what your body is whispering with the My Body’s Whispers Journal, a gentle guide to help you connect physical symptoms with spiritual, emotional, mental, and lifestyle insights.

🌿 Want to deepen your listening practice and explore real-time body wisdom with others? Join the waitlist for the bodyOS™ membership, where we learn to decode the body’s signals together.

🌐 For more tools, free downloads, and upcoming course releases, visit drbrooksheehan.com

📲 And come say hi on Instagram: @drbrooksheehan

⭐️ If you loved this episode, would you take a moment to leave a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. It helps more women learn to listen, trust, and transform their health.

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When you start restricting and your blood sugar level drops, your short-term stored sugars in your body, carbohydrate in your body, start getting used up we start having all these hormone changes.

Welcome to the body speaks podcast with me, Dr. Brook Sheehan. Join me, on a journey, in discovering how to interpret the subtle signs your body uses to communicate with you - the whispers, the screams, and everything in between. Your body truly holds the answers for your health and wellbeing. It’s time to discover them, together. Let’s dive in. 

Dr. Brook Sheehan 
Welcome back to your body speaks. I am so excited about this conversation. I've actually been looking forward to this for a few weeks now and you guys are going to understand why in just a short few minutes. But I do want to introduce Brittany Braswell, who is a registered dietician. She does food freedom and body image coaching.

For women, she's a public speaker. She's the host of the Faith-Filled Food Freedom podcast. And she has a huge mission. She has a huge mission to help women rediscover their God-given worth and experience peace with food and their bodies. Hello, listeners. Don't you know that this is something I preach so heavily as well about no diets, having no guilt about things, but really just operating in that freedom that our bodies are wise.

We're gonna talk about body wisdom. Whether Brittany is speaking on live or virtual stages, she brings a message of hope and healing, equipping women to ditch diet culture, lies, and step confidently into the abundant life that they were created for. And when she's not cheering on her clients, you'll find Brittany savoring the small town life in Alabama with her husband and her three energetic kiddos.

Welcome to the show, Brittany. I'm so excited you are here today.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD
Thank you so much Brook. I'm excited to jump in and get to this conversation with you.

Dr. Brook Sheehan
Yes, it's gonna be so fun. So I know you do a lot of amazing things with women. I know you do a lot of amazing things around food and all of that. But where I wanna take this first is I wanna go all the way back. Who was Brittany before she became a registered dietitian? How did that all come about and how did that lead to what you're doing now?

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD
⁓ man, well without giving you like the extra long version of this.

I would say I started off as a kid, I always had an interest in health and it kind of leaned towards ⁓ pediatrics and medicine. I went in, had a friend that fell off a horse once and I thought I want to be the one that like fixes it, you know, that puts her arm in a cast and all things. So I was that nerdy kid that when someone said, what do want to be when you grow up? I had to ask what it was called. And so from then on, I was like, I want to be a pediatric orthopedic surgeon. That was my response. And so over

Dr. Brook Sheehan
Love it.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD 
Over time that mouthful kind of evolved. just, I knew I wanted to be in the health space. And so I found I'm a bit of a foodie at heart and I realized, hey, nutrition is an option. And so I didn't realize that until at some point after I had already started college. And so I changed my major from pre-dental thinking I'm going to become a dentist and I'll flip-flop into nutrition. And I just found a

I thought I wanted to go into more of the sports nutrition side of things. So I did an interview with our campus sports dietician at the time who now I think he works with one of the NFL teams, but he was our collegiate sports dietician. And I thought this is fantastic. I want to work with athletes. They already have this interest in health and taking care of themselves. And so I really just any project, any paper that I could do, I tried to customize it to

sports

nutrition and it really wasn't until grad school broke that I just had so much exposure to

I was just around athletes a lot. I was doing projects. was a graduate assistant. I got to work with Pat Mahomes and some of the guys at Texas Tech before they went big. And that was a ton of fun, but working with all those athletes, I got to really see the prevalence of disordered eating, of how these college students that were so young that wanted to perform well were just taking on the

Dr. Brook Sheehan 
Mm-hmm.

⁓

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD 
these dietary and body related habits that they thought were healthy that were really hurting their relationship, not just with food and nutrition, but also with their performance and their relationships with other people. And it just really gave me this passion and kind of just felt like, I feel like this is more my calling is I really want to move into this space to really just help these, not just college athletes, but.

help those who are struggling with a negative relationship with food and with their body to show them that we can be good stewards of our health and it doesn't have to become obsessive. We don't have to take it to the nth degree. So ⁓ that's a little bit of the backstory. There's a lot more detail, you know, in between, but I really, I love what I do now. I've gotten to practice eating disorder, body image work in a lot of different settings and I'm

Dr. Brook Sheehan
Yeah.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD 
I'm in private practice now, which I absolutely love. for me, I bring in a faith component to it. I know you mentioned my podcast, Faith-Filled Food Freedom, and I find a lot of joy in doing that and talking about how does your faith play into your relationship with food and body.

Dr. Brook Sheehan 
Yes. Yep.

Amen,

I mean, it's huge. It's one of the things that my listeners know. I talk about the four pillars of health, which is physical, spiritual, emotional, and mental. You can't have all just physical health and have breaks in the other three, you know? So faith does play a huge part in that. There were a couple of things that I heard in your story and I was like, wow, this is so fascinating. originally started as an orthopedic pediatric surgeon and then

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD 
Right.

Yeah.

Dr. Brook Sheehan
You ended up in dentistry, so there was some sort of shift there.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD 
I had braces, I had braces

and saw the orthodontist and I was like, this is it. I need to make people feel better about their smile.

Dr. Brook Sheehan 
Yeah. Yeah.

Well, what I thought was cool about all of this is everything seemed very body driven. So even your passions as a little girl, like wanting to help with, you know, healing the broken bones, we know the body heals the actual broken bones, but the orthopedic surgeon sets those bones so the bones can heal correctly. And then, you know, you getting into dentistry and wanting to go that route, doing stuff with the body and then ultimately

getting onto that path for what you're doing now. And it makes me just smile with joy thinking about how, you know, a lot of us as young adults or even, you know, high schoolers thinking back like, this is what I wanna do with my life. And looking at what we're actually doing now, and I know a lot of the listeners can relate, is how much of that gets kind of twisted and turns and God really directs that path, right? And it's just takes us where...

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD
Yeah,

Dr. Brook Sheehan 
we are meant to be where we are going to be used the best and the most. So I think it's beautiful. I love that story. You obviously have had kids and got married in the process of all of the dietician school, I'm guessing, ⁓ with all of that, which is beautiful. So one of the things, and I wanna jump into this, because you talked a lot about disordered eating with the athletes.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD 
Yes.

Dr. Brook Sheehan 
and you were working on that and then you've kind of transitioned to where you are focusing more on a population of people, women, who we know experience a lot of this kind of disordered eating and these body image issues and feeling that they, you know, they're hating themselves, they're talking negatively to themselves, they're trying to force food or force food or not having food, I should say, forcing food in or not having food because

We do have a culture that does teach us to numb out in one way or another, right? Either binge or don't eat at all. And we're really going against our God-given hunger cues and those fullness cues. So I really would love an explanation on what can happen physiologically and emotionally in the body when we do disrupt these and why it can make, because one of the things that I talk about is listening to the body.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD 
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Brook Sheehan 
And I thought you brought up a great point, you when we were even talking, how it can sometimes be really unsafe to listen to the body. So I know that this is a big long worded question and I'll kind of break it into pieces is really explain what happens physiologically and emotionally when people stop those hunger cues. And then if you don't mind going on as to how it can be unsafe to listen to the body in the case of numbing these things out.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD 
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, so I'm a nerd at heart. So I could sit here and talk biochemistry and metabolism, but to keep it simple, when we start restricting, so when we, regardless of...

Dr. Brook Sheehan
Yeah

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD
maybe how your relationship with food started, or maybe you had this initial desire to, want to eat more healthfully, or I want to eat in a more health promoting way. So many of the ladies and men that I have worked with, that was the initial driver. And then it turns into this relationship with food that becomes very disordered. So when we start restricting, when we get those hunger cues and then we tell our brain, no, no, that signal is not going to lead to me following through and eating. I think I need to restrict for X, Y, Z reasons.

I think I need to be smaller or I feel like this food isn't healthy anymore. This isn't okay. This is a bad food now. We should restrict this. We start forming these new neural pathways in our brain so that this one trigger or this alert that we get, the stimulus we get from smelling food or seeing someone eat or starting to recognize, my stomach is empty or I'm getting tired. There's so many different ways our body speaks to us to

tell us we need to eat. And when we start ignoring those, at first our body gets louder. So to go into a little bit of the nerdy side of things, because there's a mental and a physiological piece to hunger. And we gotta take both into consideration. And so when you start restricting and your blood sugar level drops, your short-term stored sugars in your body, carbohydrate in your body, start getting used up.

we start having all these hormone changes. there's this neurotransmitter called neuropeptide Y and we kind of nickname it the carb craver. And essentially when we are depriving ourselves of food and carbohydrate, we get this increased production of this neurotransmitter. this is part of, it's not the only thing, there's a lot going on, but it's part of this physiological process that tries to get us to eat something, right? To help bring those blood sugars back up, to nourish.

Dr. Brook Sheehan 
Thank you.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD 
our body to keep us from getting hangry, right? To keep things working how they should. And so when we ignore that, our body eventually starts almost numbing itself out to it. I wanna see that as a gift a little bit sometimes. I'm like, the way that our bodies were designed, like, we're...

maybe we're not in pain this whole time, right? It's very uncomfortable to be very hungry. And so I think out of the goodness of God, we maybe sometimes are able to just realize, okay, well, I'm not totally in pain, but at the same time, that is not the place we're meant to stay. We're supposed to respond to these reasons our body is telling us to eat. so neurologically, we have some pathways that change. And so when we start getting those things that tell us to eat and we've said no consistently, or we've said,

Dr. Brook Sheehan (10:48)
Yes.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (10:57)
well maybe but in two more hours like we're gonna wait we're not gonna respond immediately or well maybe but not to the capacity that our body actually needs

we start having metabolic changes where our body wants to use a little, it wants to work a little less efficiently, because it wants to utilize what we give it for the most important things, right? To keep you breathing, to keep your heart pumping, to try to keep your electrolytes and balance, to try not to break your bones down too much. There's all these things that our body is trying to do to help us survive. And so physiologically, there's a lot of changes that happen. then...

mentally, emotionally. I mentioned being hangry earlier. This is one way my body speaks to me real clearly. We could probably go into that a little bit more in the episode, but there are a lot of things physiologically that initially get really, really loud for our body trying to tell us, need to eat, this is dangerous. And then after we push in them out for a while, it's like those signals get harder and harder to recognize. And so my, I guess, encouragement with this is you are not broken.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (11:35)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (12:00)
If you have a hard time recognizing hunger or fullness or honoring either one, those things for the vast majority of people, those things can be shifted and you can get them back and they can get regulated again. But it is a really tough process.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (12:14)
Yes. Yeah.

gosh, Brittany, I am a nerd too. So don't put two nerds in the same room together, because we will end up going on a whole biochemical onslaught of communication. But that was such a beautiful breakdown of what happens physiologically in the body and why it's important to really...

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (12:25)
huh. Yeah.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (12:35)
honor, honor the body, right? So you may have struggles in being able to listen, just like Brittany was talking about how those signals can get quieter and quieter. So one of the things I also talk about, you know, the body starts to whisper and it tells you it's hungry and it starts to say that. And then we, and then it gets louder and louder. So it starts to scream at us. It starts to shout. It's like the hangry, right? The emotional aspect of it we get.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (12:56)
Mm-hmm.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (12:58)
snippy, we get nasty, get, ⁓ in a rage, like we need food, our blood sugars to the floor. But then when we don't listen and we're trying to do restrictive eating, it can be problematic. But those are cues, like she was saying, can be turned on. So it's such a beautiful thing. God did design the body with so much wisdom. It is so intelligent and it can, it's resilient and it can self correct when given the proper tools or resources or things to do so. So,

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (13:01)
Yeah.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (13:24)
On that note... ⁓ no, go ahead, jump in girl.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (13:24)
And we still, I'm sorry, go ahead. I was

gonna say, just to add on to the second half of that question when you were asking about when is it unsafe to listen to your body, ⁓ something that I see a lot and that I have to remind myself, or that I have to remind a lot of the clients that I work with, is we talked about how you kind of.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (13:34)
Yes. Yeah.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (13:45)
those hunger and fullness signals can get really thrown off. And so once those have been thrown off, they're not regulated, they're not consistent. That's when you get in a really dangerous spot to fully listen to your body. It doesn't mean we stop listening. It just means we might have to give our body a little less of the, we might not need to let it be in the driver's seat so much. We might need to let it take a little back seat sometimes, at least in part, because you never want to check out and not listen to your body. ⁓

Dr. Brook Sheehan (13:47)
Yes.

right.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (14:12)
But for an example, if I have a client that's come to me that has been highly restrictive or somebody on the other end, if we're going like major spectrums here, like somebody who's restricted a lot, whether they are underweight or not, somebody who has maybe been binge eating or consistently overeating, eating past the point of fullness, either way and lots of the in between when those hunger fullness cues are dysregulated, I can't, I can't come to someone in session and go, okay, well we're going to work on

Dr. Brook Sheehan (14:21)
Mm-hmm.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (14:40)
increasing your intake and so just eat until you feel full or comfortable and then like let's work on that because if they've been restrictive they're gonna get full after just a few bites they're gonna be satiated because their body has kind of adapted to have been given so little so I'm gonna experience that.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (14:51)
Yeah, yeah.

right.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (15:00)
initial satiety earlier. So that is one time where it can be really unsafe to just trust your body that early. Our bodies were designed to be able to be trusted. However, when we make some of those changes that weren't initially meant to happen, right? When we were, when we get out of the rhythm that our bodies were designed to follow, sometimes we have to have a little support to get back and we have to say, okay, body, I recognize that you're telling me you're full and feelings aren't facts.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (15:06)
Right, Yes.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Right.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (15:27)
Right? So

sometimes our bodies are very accurate, but there are times where the signals they send us aren't necessarily untrue. Like I'm still going to feel full if I've

been restrictive, but just because I feel full, doesn't necessarily mean that I've had enough to support my nutritional needs. So in those kind of cases, same thing if you're used to significantly eating past the point of fullness, you may eat an amount that your body does need and you might say, well, I don't know if I'm totally satisfied, right? I don't know if I'm, if I'm full and that's really uncomfortable too, to be still feeling like I might still be a little bit hungry and to give your body time to kind of

Dr. Brook Sheehan (15:38)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (16:07)
adapt to that. So it's very nuanced. This is why it's really helpful to have somebody like Dr. Brook in your corner, right? Have somebody that can help you speak into like recognize what is happening in my body. Why might that be? And then what do I do with that information?

Dr. Brook Sheehan (16:11)
And it's.

Absolutely, great point, Brittany. It's very nuanced and it's important to have people like you in their corner as well, because we act as guides. We are not acting as a god. We're not saying we are smarter than your body, but we can help navigate these murky waters while you build that or rebuild that trust in your body to be able to know what it's saying, when it's saying, and what it needs in those moments. But it's turning those signals back on with the guidance of people like us. So...

Beautiful share. want to I'm such a person of metaphors. My patients know this too I just like have random metaphors that pop up out of nowhere during you know calls and things and it's beautiful I'm glad I can do that because it's being able to anchor some of these Thoughts that may not be so concrete into something a little bit more concrete but Brittany was talking about how sometimes we can't trust our body and for a lot of varying reasons and I think about it because I use a lot of the

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (17:09)
Yeah.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (17:16)
Metaphors of you know when we're working to develop this trust in our body It's like building a relationship no different than it would be building a relationship with a new friend You don't tell them everything about your life at out the gate or go into all your deep dark You know pains and hurts and all the things you build that trust as you go along and so it's it's kind of like

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (17:33)
near.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (17:38)
And forgive me for using this metaphor, but I grew up in an alcoholic home. My dad was an alcoholic. And there were moments when dad was trustworthy, when I could trust dad, but not when the alcohol was in his system, right? Then it became, I don't, what he has to say is not going to hold any weight right here. again, really random metaphor, but that's kind of what I was thinking as you were talking about the whole, you know, there are times our body is designed to be trusted.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (18:00)
Yeah.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (18:02)
My father is designed to be trusted. He's my father, you know, all those kind of things. But when alcohol gets thrown into the equation, he couldn't be trusted. when we turn off these cues in our bodies based off, you know, trying to do something we feel is beneficial because someone said it was beneficial. So we're either overeating, undereating, or we feel a certain way about ourselves. So we're trying to make our body look a certain way on the outside. That does disrupt those signals. So thank you for sharing that.

Awesome. Well, someone who's been in a long cycle of restriction, so very, very restricted eating, and this may kind of piggyback onto what we were just talking about, but how can they, and I know it's nuanced, so maybe just give an overall picture, how can they begin to rebuild that trust with their hunger and fullness cues? what are some maybe things that they can do, yeah, smaller, easier things to not get into that guilt and fear and shame about it?

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (18:44)
Yeah.

Yeah, well I would say just as a little caveat with this, anytime you're going from a place of maybe a lot of that restriction

there is very likely, it's pretty typical, I'm not gonna say normal, because it's not normal to feel fearful when we eat, but it's very typical to experience some of that in the initial stages of, I'm really nervous to eat this, or I'm really concerned about how it's gonna impact my body, or my weight, or my shape, or I feel guilty. Like if we start labeling foods as good or bad, and we recognize, okay, well I'm eating something that I've been told I need to eat to increase my nutritional intake, but it still feels like a bad food.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (19:13)
Yeah.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (19:36)
It's normal to experience some of that. It's very typical in those, especially the earlier stages of the process. And so when you are wanting to kind of dip your toes in, start working on it, think the very first thing you need to do is tell somebody you need, because again, we're not only building trust with our bodies back, but we're building trust with ourselves and our decision-making ability and how well we can hold ourselves accountable. I'm a big believer that we need to have a certain level of self-accountability.

but

we also need to know our limitations and know, I can hold myself accountable up to this point and then I really need some additional support. So that could be a friend or a family member. It could be a roommate. It could be a spouse. It could be a provider, right? You could have somebody on your team. So having somebody in your corner that can help you with some consistency, right? So we start losing those cues because of consistent restriction and we start getting them back. ⁓

Dr. Brook Sheehan (20:23)
Mm-hmm.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (20:29)
consistently overeating, we start getting them back with consistently nourishing our body. So let's say ⁓ you are eating one meal a day. You're restricting throughout the day and going, I'm just gonna wait until evening and then I'm gonna have a meal, right? Or I'm gonna eat first thing in the morning, I'm done. And whether it's more or less than that.

start by just adding in one additional time of day. Right? If I'm eating dinner because I feel like I shouldn't, I have to wait until I'm a certain level of hungry before I deserve to eat or before I think it's okay to eat to go, okay, let me do something opposite of that. I'm gonna eat first thing when I get up.

and I'm also going to eat in the evening. And so you don't have to go from one meal a day to we're going to do three meals and three snacks, right? That would probably, unless you have a lot of support. I'm not saying that's never the case. I worked in a residential treatment center for a long time and that was the case for a lot of people because

Dr. Brook Sheehan (21:21)
Yeah.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (21:22)
we gotta do the nutritional rehab sort of piece of things. But being able to just add in at least one other time a day or add in one additional nutritional component. Take a look, do a little bit of an audit to see what are the things I am eating regularly and am I missing any main nutrients. So the very first, I kind of use a four step process that I approach that I'll give you this super quick like.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (21:24)
Yep.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (21:47)
one, two, three, four, when it comes to prioritizing nutrition, my very first priority with everyone is adequacy, meaning are you eating enough to meet your total nutritional needs? Whether that is all from tootsie rolls, all from apples, all from salad, we gotta start somewhere, you gotta make sure you're eating enough, right? Then after that we go on to balance, meaning.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (21:47)
Mm-hmm.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (22:06)
Protein, carbohydrate, fat, are there any of these we're deficient in? Are there any we're getting a lot of and maybe just not enough of the other?

then from that point we can go to variety, right? If you're eating chicken, broccoli, and rice, and berries at every meal, you're probably meeting your basic nutritional needs if you're eating enough of it, but you probably still have a very disordered relationship with food. So going to variety and going, okay, let me choose a few other fruits, a few other protein sources, a few other grains, And that place, when you get to a place of pretty consistent variety where you're not nervous to...

have something that you don't normally have, that is really where we see a lot of sustainability with people's relationship with food and recovery when they have a wide variety and they're not afraid to expand variety. And then the last piece of things, which I think you probably do a lot of, Dr. Brook, is the really specific nutritional pieces where we might start looking at, somebody with diabetes or an athlete who wants to improve their performance or somebody with a chronic health condition, we might need to start getting a lot more specific.

about their nutrition or looking at micronutrients, so vitamins and minerals, or saying, hey, yes, carbohydrate, and protein in this amount is good for the typical person, but...

because of this about you, this uniqueness, this nuance, we might need to adjust things. So that's where we get more specific. And too often I think people want to jump to that, I want to get healthy. So I want to get really, really, really specific. And they skip these other stages of, well, you can eat all of the health foods you want, but if you're not eating enough, your body is not going to be in good shape. Right. So that is, that's kind of the approach that I take with that, that I would encourage don't worry about trying to get overly specific on your health to begin with. Make sure step one,

Dr. Brook Sheehan (23:39)
Right.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (23:47)
and focus on adequacy. So add in one snack, add in one meal, get some support to help you do that if you're nervous about it, and then move up that ladder, that kind of triangle pyramid from one step to the next.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (24:00)
So there's so much I want to ask there or get into there. First thing is the adequacy. Would you say the opposite would be true if somebody is overeating like to the point fullness, getting themselves to the point where they can no longer breathe because that diaphragm can't move because their stomach is so full. Would you say, you know, work on maybe just cutting a snack out a day or cutting out a little bit out of their diet? Would you say that for step one would be the opposite on that?

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (24:27)
think that's such an interesting question because here's my thought on this.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (24:28)
Yeah.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (24:32)
because so many of the women that I work with have trouble with binging or with overeating. Before I even start working on adequacy, so I'm gonna go one layer deeper with this, is we start looking for what are some of the triggers or the things that are keeping you from being able to recognize fullness that are pushing you past the point of adequacy. Because it's very simple or easy, I think, to tell someone, okay, you're eating X number of calories or this many times a day, we need to back it up.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (24:36)
Right.

Okay, let's do it.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (25:01)
But so often what I see is when that happens, it's this white knuckle effect where they just feel like I've got to use willpower and discipline and I've to be good and I've got to eat less and I've got to do all the things. And then they get to that breaking point and they get overly stressed or they get really fearful about something. I've seen about seven different needs overall that I see people trying to meet either with food or body related behaviors. That would be a whole other episode. But...

Dr. Brook Sheehan (25:09)
That's true. Yeah.

Part two, part two.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (25:28)
And maybe, yeah.

And so I go into that with them first to go, ⁓ what need or needs, maybe two, are you trying to meet by eating excessively? And once we know that...

Then we look at, let's get that need met in a different way that's not solely reliant on food. And then that's gonna actually help us get to that place of adequacy instead of excessive consumption in a way that's sustainable without just saying eat less because they're gonna end up binging again once they don't have that need met, once they're stressed or they're afraid for their safety, they need comfort. There's a whole lot of different things, but yeah, so that's.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (25:54)
Yes.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (26:03)
I had to kind of back up one stage with them to get to the point of adequacy instead of just telling them what to do, figuring out what's keeping them from doing it.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (26:12)
That's so powerful, because that's exactly what we were even talking about even towards the beginning of the episode where I was saying it's the four pillars, physical, spiritual, emotional, mental. Those emotional, mental pieces really do play a huge part in the overeating or over consumption or even under consumption anywhere on that spectrum. One of my, and yes, I do do a lot of the nuance getting

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (26:21)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (26:37)
the supplements, sure, pulling foods out of the diet that are acting as triggers for that particular person, because they're very unique to you and I, or you and I are very unique, our diets are not gonna look the same. One of my favorite ones, and you hit on that, was that third one about diversity. That's what I talk about. Body loves diversity. If we are eating the same foods over and over and over, can you imagine?

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (26:39)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yes.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (27:01)
you know, just doing the same thing over and over and over how boring that gets. You love the adventure. Your body loves that too. And so if you're eating the same fruits or the same proteins or the same carbohydrates or, you know, same fats, it's just like this again, really Dr. Brook, you're gonna give me this again. That's my body talking, right? Like what my body would say. And it's just like having that sense of diversity and you get to see the most beautiful results too because your body responds in such a positive, beautiful way.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (27:06)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (27:29)
Yay, I get raspberries today instead of just strawberries. It's so exciting, you know, and so like I love that you talked about that because that is such a huge thing as people do. They stay in their lane. They're like, well, this shaved off five pounds. I'm going to continue to eat chicken and broccoli and that's all I'm going to eat. And I'm like, yeah, but what about the steak? What about the carrots? And what if? Yeah. Right. Variety is huge. OK, so next.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (27:32)
Yeah.

Right.

Yes, we love some variety.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (27:57)
question is what would you say are the three non-negotiables required for a person if they do want to build start building this body trust?

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (28:06)
This is a really fun kind of question for me to answer because you used the term wisdom earlier, right? We have to have some wisdom to recognize what our body is telling us. And so I use that term body wisdom. And when I use it, I'm talking about is recognizing the signals my body is giving me, understanding what it means, and then going, now what do I do with it? But before we can even get to that point,

we have to develop what I call body trust. And so we have to build up the trust to be able to even listen to our bodies to say, okay, I recognize what you're telling me. I trust that that's accurate. I know what to do with it now. So ⁓ the three things that I talk with my students about a lot when it comes to how do we build trust in our bodies?

the three kind of parts we focus on. Number one is what most people want to jump into and it's interoceptive awareness, which is essentially just recognizing that, my body is speaking to me, right? Like going, okay, I can tell when my heart is racing because my eight year old just jumped out from behind the couch and said, boo, right? that is interoceptive awareness. Me being able to go, okay, something has changed, right? Or your bladder getting more full. That's very normal for whatever reason in our society.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (29:07)
Yeah.

Right.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (29:15)
We're okay with our bladder getting full and experiencing that kind of awareness, but we go, ⁓ I'm hungry. that's not good. I shouldn't be hungry yet. And we push it down. So we have to start recognizing, and it takes time. key number two here, part number two to this is patience.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (29:24)
Right.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (29:31)
which nobody likes. This is the one thing when you're growing up, when I was growing up in church, people would always say, don't pray for patience. Don't pray for patience. Cause you're not gonna get it. You're gonna get opportunities to be patient. And so I have done all the things. I prayed for patience not that long ago and I was like, God, what are you doing to me? So we need patience with our bodies though. So.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (29:36)
Yeah. Yes. Same.

Right, all kinds of warfare.

Yeah

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (29:53)
We've got to start recognizing and accepting that our body speaks to us and that it's normal. It's a good thing. And we can learn to trust it, but before we can trust it, we have to actually recognize, it is talking, right? We got to get connected to what are those things happening? My stomach is in knots. Okay. Is it maybe because I'm nervous? Is it because I ate something that's not settling well with me? Am I anxious about something? And so getting a chance to start asking those questions and being patient with ourselves to not feel like we have to have the answer immediately.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (30:04)
Mm-hmm.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (30:22)
or get it right the first time. I feel like that is the hard thing for so many people to hear. Like when you're very type A, I'll raise my hand. I'm type A, I love a good checklist, I love to be right, and I like to be right the first time. And so this is a pride issue sometimes, is we've just gotta go. Trial and error is part of the process. When our body is speaking to us, when we start working on that awareness,

Dr. Brook Sheehan (30:24)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (30:45)
We need to act on it and we need to test out okay, is this what it's telling me? Is this feeling in my stomach hunger? Is it telling me I'm still hungry? So we eat a little bit more, we give it little time and we go, I'm still experiencing it. Okay, maybe I didn't eat enough. Or we eat it and we go, ⁓ no, 10 minutes later, I'm overly full. That wasn't hunger. That was me nervous because this person, like my boss is sitting down there, right? And I've got a project that's late, right? So we have to have the patience to experiment. And then the last piece,

Dr. Brook Sheehan (30:55)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (31:13)
And this can go a couple different ways. I talk about it a lot from a faith perspective, but it's also really relevant from a clinical perspective. we talked about interoceptive awareness, that's part one. Part two is patience. Part three is everybody's least favorite. Worst than patience is submission. And so this is why it takes time to build body trust, because it's this is not fun. We want it just to work immediately. And so I talk about a lot with.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (31:26)
Yep.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (31:35)
a lot of my clients like submission to the Holy Spirit in the sense of we want what we want and we want it now. We have to work on the now piece with the patients. But sometimes when our body is...

Speaking to us the thing that we want to do to respond to it is not the thing that's gonna be the most beneficial And so sometimes we might recognize. Hey, I'm hungry Awesome. Okay, we're learning that we've got that interoceptive awareness piece a little more unlock now we want to eat and I hear this so often because I'm in the world where there's a lot of intuitive eating talk and Intuitive eating is great, but it's also not your recovery Bible. It can't be like the only thing you're going off of because

There's more to our bodies than that. we've got to use some logic when we make decisions. We've got to take what our bodies are saying into consideration and we've got to take things like, okay, I really want this particular food, right? I really want, like my husband might say, I really want ice cream. And I might go, well, you're lactose intolerant. So if you eat this ice cream, it's gonna be delicious now, but you are gonna make everybody.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (32:31)
you

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (32:37)
and yourself uncomfortable later. Right? so it's going, so it's going, yeah, so sometimes we got to submit to that. again, it might be a clinical team member going, okay, I know you're.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (32:40)
Right exactly logic

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (32:49)
you have some more perspective in this than I do. So I'm gonna let you help me make this decision right now. This is not handing over control, letting someone tell you how to feed your body and how to move it and what to do with it, but it's allowing other people to be a part of the decision-making process that you already trust. And so maybe for you it has to do with your faith and you ask the Lord, help me make these decisions and give me some discernment.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (33:06)
I love that.

Right.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (33:12)
it may be a family member, may be a clinical treatment team to say, hey, I'm trying to, I think my body's telling me this and I've been working on this a while. So I feel I've been patient. feel like I've built up some consistency, but can you give me a little bit of wisdom? And I'm gonna, I'm gonna trust you because I'm not at a place yet. I can fully trust all of this. And so it's kind of getting that outside, like having trust in something or someone outside of you.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (33:26)
Yeah.

my gosh, so beautiful. I love all three of those. And I hope you guys as the listeners, like just go back, rewind everything she just said in that whole section, because so powerful and in building that body trust so that you can get to a point where you learn to have the wisdom to be able to hear what your body is saying and what it's speaking to you. So Brittany, that was beautiful. One of the things I did want to hit on when you were saying that

kind of popped up in my head as you were talking about is yes, having the trusted advisors, the family members, guides like yourself and I that can help walk them through or somebody else on their medical team. But also, and you also said prayer and talking to the Holy Spirit and absolutely 100%. And I also think journaling is a huge aspect and it's not about making this another to do on your list and making this another thing to be overwhelmed by.

my gosh, you gotta be kidding me. gotta like, no, it's not. Even it could be like recording a voice memo in your phone. Like I ate such and such right now and I'm feeling super bloated and blah, blah, blah, blah. it can be as simple as that. It does not have to be this long drawn out process of all these things. But that can kind of help you get a picture too of what's going on. So you're not just like you've said, because intuitive eating while great in theory, there's a lot of holes that can be poked into that.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (34:39)
Yes. Yeah.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (34:59)
So it's not a one size fits all approach. And so really kind of looking at this as bigger picture. So, so beautiful, Brittany. Thank you for being here. I do have one final question that I do ask all of my guests on this show. And as you know, because you've been referencing a lot, that the show is called your body speaks. And so.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (35:11)
Yeah!

Dr. Brook Sheehan (35:19)
I want to know in your experience, what ways have you found or experienced the body speaking?

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (35:26)
goodness, I feel like this has become something that I guess with the work that I do, I just I notice it all the time because I talk about it all the time. So I mean, my family probably gets tired of it too, because we'll be sitting at the table and if my son or my daughter, you know, has

Dr. Brook Sheehan (35:30)
Yeah.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (35:41)
my daughter kind of eats like a bird sometimes and so she'll eat something and she's like, I think I'm done and I'm like, okay, can you tell? how do you know? What's your body telling you? How do you know if you're done? And so, for me, one of the biggest signals and my husband would back me on this, the way that I know my body is speaking to me is I do, we talked about this a little bit earlier, but I get moody and hangry and unpleasant when I have not had enough sleep and when I have not eaten. so, mood changes are one of the earlier things.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (36:03)
Yep.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (36:08)
for me mood changes and then focus ⁓ when my blood sugar level is starting to drop I can tell pretty quickly like okay I have about a 30 minute window before I become really unpleasant it takes me back to this this story there's a there's a story in first Kings chapter 19 where Elijah is just

Dr. Brook Sheehan (36:10)
Mmm.

You

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (36:28)
I don't even want to live anymore. Like he's running away, his life has been threatened and he's like, I am depressed essentially. Like I just, God just let me die. And I'm like, I have those moments where it's not let me die, but I can't handle this anymore. And it's so funny to me. find...

Dr. Brook Sheehan (36:30)
Yes, yes.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (36:41)
I don't know, I find laughter in scripture sometimes because an angel comes to Elijah and Elijah has laid down to take a nap and he wakes up and he goes eat something. And he tells him to eat, so he eats, he takes a nap, he wakes back up and he goes eat again. And then he goes on his way and he does his thing and he's no longer in this same state and so I'm like this is me, I need to eat, I need to sleep, my body is very, very aware of when I need rest and.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (36:50)
Yeah. ⁓

Yes. Yes.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (37:09)
refueling and so ⁓ there are so many different ways but those are some of the ones that I my stomach yes my stomach growls I can tell I'm getting hungry that way but I'm much more keenly aware like okay I'm starting like I'm giving really short answers to somebody and I would normally give a little more explanation so I always find that I always find that fun to just ask your body a little

Dr. Brook Sheehan (37:23)
Yeah. Yeah.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (37:30)
Question, every now and then, hey, is that what you're trying to tell me? And when you don't know, that's where a lot of that trial and error comes in. So I might go, okay, I think I'm getting hungry, or I'm starting to get a little hangry, it because, I'm getting moody, is it because I'm hungry? So maybe I go and I get a small snack, and if my mood corrects itself, I'm like, okay, my blood sugar was just dropping. And if it doesn't, then I go, okay, something else is going on, I need to have a conversation with somebody.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (37:30)
Yes.

Yes!

Love that. First off, two things I want to say. One, how simple it is to really self-correct that. Like, when you're saying you're noticing these behaviors, it's like, ⁓ a little nap and a little bit of food. A lot of times we want to overcomplicate it in our mind that it's all these things must be happening and my gosh, and this person hurt my feelings and I'm caring resentment about this and that, da da, and this client did this. And my gosh, just go to bed. Like you were saying, sharing the...

the story about Elijah, it's so true. we're gonna put you to sleep right now. We're not even gonna cater to your whole just kill me now approach. Yeah.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (38:26)
Yeah. Yes, we're not even gonna address that. There's

this YouTube video that I have seen of these two brothers and this one is like three and he's sitting at the breakfast table and he's whining and he's like, and his older brother who's probably two, three years older goes, have you taken a nap? And he goes, no! And goes, you need one.

And I'm like, that, that is me. I get whiny when I'm tired. the bodies can speak real loudly when you are willing to listen.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (38:52)
It's amazing what sleep does.

Totally. ⁓ so true. And then the other beautiful thing you said in that whole time you were sharing is you said ask your body questions and that you hit on something because I'm about to do an entire podcast series on learning to ask your body questions and what kind of questions to ask and how to break it down and to do to deduce it going okay if the body says yes it wants chicken well how much chicken then is it three ounces is it four?

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (39:13)
That's so good.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (39:23)
all of these things, because it's important that we ask our body questions. And those were just physical examples. Of course, you went into all the different things on the emotional, the mental, the spiritual side of questions as well. is there anger here? Or did somebody set you off? Then you have to have deeper questions with people. And I think that that's so beautiful, because you're like, yeah, I ate, but I'm still feeling this way. Yes, I slept, but I'm still feeling this way.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (39:24)
Yeah!

Dr. Brook Sheehan (39:47)
let's get to the heart of the matter, right? Like the heart issue behind that. so Brittany, this has been so fun. I know when I connected with you the first time, I was just like, I love this girl. we are such kindred spirits. are...

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (39:50)
Yeah.

We are. We had such a good time on my podcast

too. Y'all go listen to Dr. Brooks episode on my podcast. It was so fun.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (40:05)
Yes, yes,

so fun. So I know ⁓ in the future we will definitely be doing this again. ⁓ Just I thank you so much for your time. How can people get a hold of you? How can they connect with you? How can they enter into your ecosystem?

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (40:20)
Yeah, well, if y'all want a little bit of a recap or a deeper dive into what we talked about, the Body Trust Framework, because I talk about this a lot, I just created a workbook for it. So I've got a free workbook. You can download it on the website. It's BrittanyBraswellRD.com slash BTF for Body Trust Framework.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (40:29)
Love it. Yup. Yup.

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (40:39)
And I did a podcast, I did a four part podcast series on it because there's so much to dive into and I know we didn't get a chance to get into it all today. So you can grab that workbook. I love to hang out on the podcast. Depending on when you're listening, I am right now, I'm doing two episodes a week, which is really fun. So yeah, hang out with me on Faith Filled Food Freedom or I like to hang out sporadically on Instagram at BrittanyBraswellRD.

Dr. Brook Sheehan (40:45)
Yeah.

And I'll put all those links for you guys to be able to easily just click on it and get to where you need to be in the show notes below but again Brittany thank you so much for this time what a beautiful Conversation and for those of you listening I hope that there was so much value and you gained so much from it and you got to laugh along with us because we had a lot of fun on this podcast so until next time I will see you then have a great rest of your week

Brittany Braswell, MS, RDN, LD (41:19)
You